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Chef Capp - Cooking and Kitchen Management in One

Reinventing Home Cooking and Grocery Management

In the demanding environment we live in, preparing meals at home can often be quite challenging, from finding recipes, to organizing pantry items and managing grocery shopping. The vision of Chef Capp was to help individuals overcome these everyday obstacles, and to empower the home cook.

This self-initiated project involved a team of 4, including a product designer, front-end developer, back-end developer, and myself as a UI/UX designer/developer.

Designing the right thing

Chef Capp was born out of my frustrations with cooking at home. After conversations with friends and family, I realized I was not alone.

Once I formed a team of like-minded individuals to address these common home cooking problems, I listed some hypotheses, listed below. These are based on my own experiences and observations of friends and family over the years, but they needed validation beyond my social bubble.

Problem hypotheses

User research plan

Upon aligning on the problem hypotheses, we crafted a survey to collect quantitative data on the prevalence and severity of the hypothesized problems. In other words, we wanted to confidently answer the questions:

This would help us both validate some of our hypotheses, but also get a pulse on which problems are the most painful and most common, which would help us prioritize which problems to solve for in an MVP.

Additionally, we developed an interview guide to gather qualitative insights on the home cooking experience that a survey cannot capture. Through interviewing participants, we wanted to capture the more nuanced nature of home cooking and answer the questions:

Research insights

Through a combination of our team’s networks and organic social media traffic, we had over 800 survey responses from all over the world and interviewed 5 people.

How enthusiastically strangers took to our survey in particular was a welcome surprise. Through both the interviews and the survey responses, we learned that people are indeed frustrated with the current solutions available.

This was proof that the problem we identified is popular and frequent – an excellent startup project.

Our user research, based on extensive survey responses, illuminated critical pain points prevalent among home cooks. Here are some highlights from our research:

The top 5 items identified as home cooking challenges, expressed as a percentage of the survey participants

We discovered that 4 of the 5 top challenges identified by the survey participants aligned with the core problems to address:

The top 3 technology related frustrations, expressed as a percentage of the survey participants

The top frustrations relating to the current tech solutions on the market are also identified by the survey participants. These also closely aligned with the core problems to address:

The frequency at which the survey participants claimed to meal plan, expressed as a rating from 1 to 5.

Our survey results also supported that even without our guidance there was a good amount of meal planning being done by home cooks.

These insights were instrumental in guiding our design process, focusing on addressing the most prevalent pain points while streamlining the user experience.

Designing the thing right

Looking at the problems we had identified and validated in our research phase. We started expanding the idea by expanding on the functionality and features the app would need. Laying out these features as parts of activities in a user story map. Our user story map gave us a vision of what the complete app would look like.

User story map

The information architecture stemmed from a fusion of survey-derived data and collaborative discussions within the team. Features were intuitively and technically interlinked to ensure a seamless user journey through the app.

In crafting Chef Capp, we methodically prioritized features based on their potential to alleviate the identified common problems. To achieve our Minimal Viable Product (MVP) goal, we refined these features to the bare essentials.

Post-MVP, we charted a roadmap for additional features, aligning them with our long-term vision for the app's evolution.

Wireframing

We looked at each user flow and started turning them into wireframes. We looked at existing cooking platforms and existing design patterns for standard features like user on-boarding, authentication and navigation. For features that would have been unique to Chef Capp like our inventory management and cooking substitution system, we imagined unique flows that we would later run user tests for and iterate.

Complete wireframe of the MVP

Mockups

To streamline the our design process, we decided to use Google's Material Design as the underlying design system for our app.

Google's Material Design site

This meant we could focus our efforts on the non-standard parts of the app while utilizing the Material Design System to handle common interaction components. Utilizing Material Design would also have the added benefit of being simple to implement in Google's front-end framework Flutter.

Onboarding and login
Recipe browsing and cooking
Highlights of the design decisions behind the cooking view.

For development, we chose Flutter as our front-end framework and Firebase as our backend framework. We currently have a functioning UI, Navigation and Database. In parallel, we are also creating content for the platform by creating recipes, cooking them and photographing them in preparation for populating the database.We also have many future ideas for Chef Capp, such as partnering up with grocery stores to enable in-app shopping.

Current day

Sadly this project was put on hiatus due to personal-life matters of the team taking priority. Eventually we unanimously agreed to disband the project to prioritize other pursuits.

The source files have been made public on my GitHub should you choose to take a look or use any of our work.

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